face-detection

Hi, after a quite break I am back to my blog to post some new things related to optimized computer vision algorithms on mobile platform. I have been experimenting with android recently to come up with an easiest setup for OpenCV to start developing (I will be posting about it in my next blog). In this post, I will be explaining how to do Face detection in almost real time using OpenCV’s Haar cascades. This is not an advanced tutorial on detection/object recognition but it will help you to start working on your custom classification problems. Let us dive in!

A quick note before diving in, this blog expects that you have already read my previous blogs on OpenCV in iOS (An Introduction, The Camera)so that you can have the starter code up and running.

In this blog post, we are going to detect the faces and eyes from live video stream of your iOS device’s camera. Now start following the steps mentioned below!

Rename ViewController.m to ViewController.mm to start coding in Objective-C++.

Add necessary haarcascade files from ‘<opencv-folder>/data/haarcascades/’ directory into your supporting files directory of Project. You can do this by right-click on Supporting Files and select ‘Add files to <your-project name>’

Open ViewController.mm and start adding the following lines of code for enabling Objective-C++ and let us also define some colors to draw to identify faces and eyes on the image.

Now you need to edit the ViewController interface to initialise the parameters for live view, OpenCV wrappers to get camera access through AVFoundation and Cascade Classifiers.

In the ViewController implementation’s viewDidLoad method write the following code to setup the OpenCV view.

The tricky part is reading the Cascade classifiers inside the project. Follow the steps suggested below to do the same and start the videoCamera!

Once the videoCamera is started, each image has to be processed inside the processImage method!

Now the code is complete! Please note that I am not covering specific math topics behind the Haar-Cascades detection as I feel there are so many blogs out there which can explain it really good. For code related to this blog, you can contact me via E-mail (Contact). The screenshot of the execution of my code is placed below!